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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Guided cooking

ChefSteps Adds “Conversational Cooking” To Sous Vide With Echo Skill

We’ve talked a lot on The Spoon about the power of the Amazon Echo in the kitchen – as a virtual sous chef, a custom bartender, a unique component of guided cooking and just a helpful assistant (Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes!) And the power of the Echo as a frictionless controller in the smart home is evident in the myriad of skills announced from virtually every top smart home manufacturer – lights, thermostats, even locks now have limited voice control functionality with Alexa.

So it’s no surprise when one of the big players in the smart kitchen space announces plans to deepen its Echo integration, beefing up Alexa’s power as an AI assistant. ChefSteps, the Seattle-based culinary startup discussed its Amazon Echo skill for Joule, a sous vide cooker and the company’s inaugural hardware device last week at the GeekWire conference.

We covered Joule’s launch extensively, detailing ChefSteps move to give back money to backers when initial demand far exceeded their expectations and production costs were lower than expected. As the emerging sous vide trend quickly grew thanks in no small part to Joule competitors like Anova and Sansaire, Joules began shipping to eager backers and the company began talking about voice control. In an initial post about Amazon Echo, ChefSteps explained,

“ask any chef who’s ever barked “Fire!” at her line while a packed house awaited their entrees: sometimes, a cook’s best tool is her voice. That’s where Alexa comes in.”

Initially, the ChefSteps Joule skill for Echo is limited to basic, albeit helpful, functionality. Users could ask Alexa to check the status of the temperature, or set the temperature in preparation for a particular recipe, or stop the device. But ChefSteps’ co-founder Chef Chris Young discussed plans to go much further with Echo, using a deeper well of knowledge to create a true AI helper for your sous vide cooking.

Dubbed “conversational cooking,” the new Echo skill will enable home chefs to get even more help, asking Alexa to “start cooking my steak medium rare.” Joule users can give Alexa basic information, like the size of the meat and the level of doneness they’d like and Alexa will set Joule to the correct temp and cook it for the amount of time needed to accommodate. Perhaps most interestingly, Alexa will act as a customized cookbook of sorts, remembering the instructions from past recipes and storing them for future use.

In the future, Young and his team expect even cooler Alexa features like contextual recipe and cooking instructions based on time constraints and in-app food purchasing. In other words – they are just getting started.

Cuciniale Launches Intelligent Cooking System In US (via Kickstarter)

Early this year when I first wrote about the guided cooking trend after the Housewares show in Chicago, one of the companies I mentioned was German startup Cuciniale.

The company, founded by former executives of professional kitchen range maker Rational, first debuted parts of what would become its intelligent cooking system back in 2014, but only began to show the fuller vision of what became the intelligent cooking system in fall of last year.

With the company launching the US version of its guided cooking system on Kickstarter today, I decided to speak with Cuciniale CEO Holger Henke, the former CMO of Rational, about his company’s journey over the past five years and how Cuciniale differs from the other guided cooking systems making their way to market.

Wolf: How long have you been working on the Cuciniale intelligent cooking system?

Henke: The company was founded in 2012 and we’ve been working on the system for five years. We released a retrofit solution in the Sensor+/App in 2014, but that version required the user to manually set the appropriate heat.

Wolf: How is the Cuciniale Intelligent Cooktop different from other “guided cooking” devices such as the Hestan Cue or Pantelligent?

Henke: For one, it works with any induction cookware (ed note: the Hestan Cue comes with its own induction – and Bluetooth connected – cookware, while the Pantelligent is not induction compatible).

Second, heat and cooking time are optimized automatically to the varying food properties. The probe (GourmetSensor) measures temperature of the pan and within the food accurately and quickly.  We use artificial intelligence homed by a huge amount of empirical knowledge on automatic cooking and this allows us to set the heat with great accuracy (within 1 Watt accuracy) depending on the amount, weight, size, structure and composition of the food.

Wolf: How does the European and US market differ for smart kitchen and guided cooking?

Henke: On one hand, the needs of the consumer are the same in the US, Europe and China. They want to cook better and in a more convenient way.

However, US and, surprisingly, Chinese consumers are more open to smart innovations in the kitchen. Europeans tend to be much more hesitant and conservative. As a result, we believe the speed of adaption will be the higher in the US and China compared to Europe.

Wolf: Can you tell us how many of the retrofit system and the Cuciniale intelligent cooking system have been sold?

Henke: We’ve sold thousands of the retrofit system (the stand-alone Sensor prob/app), but without any marketing support. The built-in version of the smart induction cooktop was announced in September 2015 during IFA (ed note: A European trade show similar to CES) and will begin to ship in 2017 in Europe and the US.  We will sell Cuciniale technology through different, smaller European premium brand names with a ‘powered by Cuciniale’ logo. We will do the same in Asia and in the US as well.

You can find out more about the Cuciniale intellgent cooking system at Kickstarter.

The Best Alexa Skills For Your Smart Kitchen

The Amazon Echo has become almost synonymous with kitchen tech – with the grocery list assistance and Amazon Prime ordering capabilities, early adopters of the voice assistant Bluetooth speaker set Echo right on their countertops. Amazon has done a nice job making sure that the Echo’s open API means just about anyone can develop a third-party skill for the device. So far that’s led to thousands of skills, with varying degrees of usefulness.

But what about skills for the actual kitchen? While there’s no shortage of smart home skills for the Echo, the functionality for the kitchen isn’t as robust just yet. But there are a handful of skills, both native and third-party, that can make cooking and eating a little bit easier. The Amazon Echo app lists close to 100 skills in the Food & Drink category alone – though many of them have one star and bad reviews. Some enable helpful resources like how to bake a cupcake or the right amount of time to store certain foods in the fridge. But others, like the “Sourdough” skill – dedicated to making different variations of sourdough bread, seem more trivial.

We’ve culled the list of kitchen-related Alexa skills and made a list of the ones that seem most useful to help consumers get the most out of Echo and turn the device into an on-demand sous chef or bartender. We’ll continue to update as the list grows!

Recipes Skills

Food Network
Alexa, send me the recipe I saw on The Pioneer Woman yesterday.
The Food Network is the first major cuilnary network to join forces with Amazon Echo to deliver a unique skill. At a basic level, you can ask Alexa what time your favorite cooking shows are going to air – but even better, she can give you the recipes that you saw on those shows to make in your own kitchen. Now if she could only bring Top Chef contestants to your door via Uber.

Campbell’s Kitchen
Alexa, ask Campbell’s Kitchen what’s for dinner
Campbell’s is the first and only Big Food manufacturer to take advantage of Alexa’s presence in the kitchen to make recipe suggestions. Of course, Campbell’s wants you to center your meals around their products, but attempts to make dinnertime easy with a daily list of five recipes.

CookBook
Alexa, ask cookbook how to (make what you to eat for your meal)
This skill is the most intriguing in the recipe category as it not only gives you the ingredients and steps to cook your chosen meal, it will also read back the recipe to you as you prepare your food. Arguably the hands-free functionality of Amazon’s AI interface is one of the most compelling use cases for the device.

Meal Idea
Alexa, ask meal idea to give me some meal ideas
The verbal activation of this skill is redundant, but the premise behind this skill is solid. Stumped about what to make for dinner? Tell Alexa what you’ve got on hand and she will suggest some recipes. Helpful during meal prep or while making your grocery list for the week.

Alcoholic Beverages

The Bartender
Alexa, ask the bartender, what’s in a [Tom Collins]?
This skill gives Alexa access to over ten thousand cocktail recipes and instructions on how to make them. Use this to impress your friends at a dinner party or to try out new drinks after a long day at work.

MySomm
Alexa, recommend a wine for a roast chicken.
Ever wanted to be friends with a wine expert? The MySomm skill gives you your own personal sommelier who can make hundreds of recommendations based on what food you’re eating. Good for when you’re having company or when you’ve cooked a nice family meal and want the perfect drink to pair.

What Beer
Alexa, ask what beer goes with a burger?
What Beer is like MySomm, but for beer. You can ask What Beer for pairs of hundreds of food items, mostly common meals like burgers, fish, steak and desserts.

Cooking Assistance

Meat Thermometer
Alexa, ask Meat Thermometer what is the best temperature for veal?
We won’t address the fact that you’re cooking veal – aka baby cow – for dinner. Instead we’ll say that this tool is incredibly helpful if you’re waiting for something to finish cooking to a safe temperature before you remove it from its heating source. Turkey, chicken, fish – you name it, Meat Thermometer can tell you the exact temp for safe eating.

Measurements
Alexa, how many tablespoons are in one cup?
This is a native Alexa skill and one that demonstrates the real use case for a voice assistant in the kitchen. Basic questions while you’re cooking can be answered, the info given in an instant and saving you from cleaning your hands, pulling out your phone and searching the internet for the right answer.

Timer
Alexa, set a timer for 30 minutes.
Also a native Alexa skill but another handy tool that you can use for almost any meal. If you’ve got more than one thing on the stove, in the oven or on the grill and you’re trying to monitor them all, it’s helpful to have more than one timer. Also if you’re using the Echo to listen to podcasts or music or the news while you cook, it will interrupt the entertainment to let you know time is up.

Caloric Intake
Alexa, how many calories in a package of Oreos?
A lot – you probably don’t need Alexa to tell you that. But a helpful tool for meal prep and general nutritional guidelines as you plan what to eat and try to stay healthy.

So there you have it – a list of the most helpful Alexa kitchen & food skills. We’ll update this list from time to time as new skills are developed and Alexa becomes an even more helpful sous chef. Stay tuned.

How Darren Vengroff Is Helping Cookware Maker Meyer Reinvent Itself (And Cooking)

Besides fire itself, there’s nothing more old school in the kitchen the good old pot or pan. And while advances such as non-stick surfaces and induction cookware have breathed fresh air into the cookware market every few years or so, the reality is that a pan is still a pan is still a pan.

Or is it?

Well, one way the pan could transform itself is through communicating with other devices around it, at least if cookware giant Meyer has its way. That’s because a few folks within an upstart division within Meyer called Hestan Smart Cooking have been busy at work creating an entirely new product called the Hestan Cue, a system which utilizes a Bluetooth connected pan, an induction burner and an app to orchestrate the entire experience.

At the center of the project is long-time cooking and tech industry veteran Darren Vengroff, who became the new group’s chief scientist when Meyer stealthily acquired his startup Meld last year. The acquisition came just months after Vengroff and his team had had a successful Kickstarter campaign for a Bluetooth connected knob that was retrofitted to existing stoves to add precision cooking capabilities.

As it turns out, Meld’s tech and the team was just the thing Meyer’s leadership felt could help them create a new approach to cookware and possibly cooking itself. We sat down to talk with Darren how he became a part of the Hestan Cue team and what exactly is this thing called guided cooking.

Wolf: How did Meyer end up acquiring Meld?

Vengroff: Last year, Christoph Milz (the Executive Director for Hestan Cue) called me up and he said, “Hey, I’m doing some consulting for Meyer,” which is a very large company that makes cookware under quite a wide variety of brands. He said, “Stanley Cheng, the CEO of Meyer, would like to come up. I’ve been talking to them and would like to come up and see what you’re doing.”

I said, “Sure, great.” This was on a Friday afternoon. They came on Monday. We gave them a little demo of what we were doing. It was interesting. It was Christoph, whom I had obviously known for many years, Stanley Cheng, the CEO of Meyer, and then Philip Tessier, a chef who I have heard of but I have never met before who actually worked for Thomas Keller at Per Se and The French Laundry and had represented the US in the Bocuse d’Or competition.

We talked them through, answered a bunch of questions, and to make a long story short, we shared a lot of common ground on the vision of where smart cooking and what we now call guided cooking was going, and we decided to join forces and Hestan Smart Cooking is the result of that.

Wolf: What is the Hestan Cue?

Vengroff: We’ve been talking a lot about temperature control, and temperature control is a great way to help people be better cooks. I think layered on top of that though is this concept of guiding, which I think is critical in helping build confidence and helping people essentially leveling up their games, so what we have in the app we think of it as sort of a GPS for cooking is the analogue.

You go through it step-by-step and when you get to a step, which in a normal recipe or an old-fashioned recipe would say put the pan on medium, well it says the pan on the induction burner and you do that.

It’s sort of giving out that guidance and also giving you that confidence because you know when you get to the step where the fish hits the pan. When someone like Phil Tessier (United States Bocuse D’or head coach and Hestan culinary director) cooks fish, that’s how it comes out. He knows what he’s doing. Most home cooks don’t cook fish often enough and don’t have the skill to produce that resulted and are intimidated and afraid and won’t try it, but this gives that guidance and confidence and sort of guaranteed results.

Wolf: What makes this system different? 

Vengroff: The idea that it’s a system is kind of the key. The three main components and there is the app with the guidance. There is the cookware with the embedded temperature sensors and the ability to communicate over Bluetooth, and then there’s the induction burner, which can communicate over Bluetooth as well and adjust the heat and power level accordingly.

I think if you had anyone of those things by itself or even any of those, you’re nowhere near what you have with the three put together. That’s how we will sell the system when it comes out as a package like that to get you started. I think once you have that system obviously, you can expand upon it and you can potentially add new things to it that work within the context of the system, but I think you’re absolutely right. The way people cook, they just don’t cook with one thing, right? They cook with a combination of different tools that are in their kitchens. Bringing the right tools together in the right way I think makes a tremendous difference.

Wolf: You guys (Hestan Cue) have the base of the pan, but you also have like base of the pot. I think there can be ultimately a degree of modularity, depending on what type of cooing you’re cooking. Do you think modularity is important?

Vengroff: Yeah, absolutely. We support a variety of different variety, both wet and dry cooking modes, some really cool things actually you can do in the pot that we’ll be talking about in the not-too-distant future. But there is some really interesting stuff that we’re doing there in our test kitchens that we’ll sort of be revealing soon.

But I think you’re right. It’s modular and it’s extendable, and I think it’s not it slices and dices. This one component does everything. I think again going back to where we started in sous vide and where we are now with this, it’s this recognition that certain tools are really good at certain cooking techniques and terrible at others. Let’s take the best of the way people traditionally cook or people with a ton of skill traditionally cook and some of the pieces that will let people up their game.

This post is a shortened and slightly edited version from a transcript of our podcast conversation with Darren Vengroff for the Smart Kitchen Show. You can read the full transcript here. 

The future of cooking with Darren Vengroff

This episode of the Smart Kitchen Show features the Chief Scientist for Hestan Cue, the division of cookware giant Meyer creating a next-generation smart cooking product called the Hestan Cue.

Darren and Mike discuss the early days of sous vide, the evolution of precision cooking, the emergence of a new appliance category called guided cooking systems and much more. If you’re interested in the future of cooking, this is a good episode to check out.

You can find out more about Hestan Cue at www.hestancue.com

Podcast: From Cars to Precision Cooking: The Story of Cinder

A decade ago, Eric Norman was working on product design at Toyota headquarters in Japan. Now, he’s taken his love of cuisine and food and is applying much of what he learned creating big metal boxes to cart us around to helping create the next generation of cooking devices.

You can find out more about Cinder at www.cindercooks.com

What’s Next From Those That Brought Us Consumer Sous Vide?

When you look at the recent history of kitchen tech, one of the biggest categories to emerge over the past decade is sous vide.  What started as a fixation for molecular gastronomy explorers like Nathan Myhrvold has moved to the early stages of becoming mainstream as big retailers like Target and Best Buy plan nationwide rollouts of consumer sous vide circulators.

And while sous vide is still early in its life from a consumer adoption standpoint, many of those who helped consumerize the technique and the products are busy working on their next act to help make people better cooks through the application of precision, technology and understanding.

Before looking at what’s next after sous vide, it’s worth looking at what sous vide itself brought to the table (and the kitchen):

It was the starting point for precision cooking in the home. Before sous vide, cooking really was a guessing game with the widely varying precision of traditional cooking appliances in terms of heat and temperature. For the first time with sous vide, a cook knows exactly the temperature they are cooking at and can get fairly precise results.

It’s an example of how applying modern technology can democratize a professional cooking technique.  Sous vide cooking has been in restaurant kitchens for well over a decade, but it’s only now become more widely adopted in consumer kitchen as companies like Anova and Sansaire use modern technology to bring the price down to consumer levels.

It represents a natural and organic integration of app with cooking hardware. We’re seeing more and more kitchen hardware come to market with apps, whether that’s connected refrigerators like the Samsung Family Hub or connected ovens, but sous vide apps were one of the first and most obvious examples where connectivity to manage a device makes sense.

But now, here we are in 2016 and things are changing rapidly. Those that helped pioneer the early sous vide market are still pioneering, only now they’re working on new things. Here are some ideas of what they may be cooking up:

Guided Cooking. I wrote about this trend in March, where I saw the fusion of connected cooking appliances, precision cooking and app guidance as the emergence of a new category. In some ways this is a very natural evolution of sous vide, and companies like ChefSteps are essentially creating a guided cooking system in the form of a sous vide circulator. Others like Hestan Cue (which is the result of the acquisition of Meld) are working on what we call a guided cooking system, with the help of veterans of the sous vide world in Darren Vengroff and Christoph Milz.

The Hestan Cue

The Hestan Cue

New Cooking Appliances, New Ways To Cook. One thing that is clear is that once you add more computing power, connectivity and software to a cooking device, it not only gives you a more intelligent device, but it can also fundamentally change the way you cook.  The folks at Innit and June see the possibilities from applying machine learning and data analytics to a cooking device. NXP’s RF cooking division (previously Freescale) is working with home appliance makers to create new ways to cook food with radio frequency technology. Anova, the leading consumer sous vide company, has made it clear they don’t plan to stop with sous vide circulators and could be exploring new cooking devices.

The Searzall

The Searzall

New Scientific Techniques May Mean New Consumer Products. Other cutting edge culinary explorers like Dave Arnold are also busy trying to create new products, and after the Searzall, a steak searing accessory that pairs well with sous vide, Arnold is busy working on a consumer friendly home centrifuge machine that could do interesting things with sauces and mixing drinks. Not exactly cooking, but an example of some of the new approaches we’ll see from folks fusing scientific technique and the kitchen.

And Then There’s Modernist. After helping to usher in the modern food science revolution, the folks at Modernist Cuisine seemed content to mainly write books and put out some specialty cooking kits .

But that may be changing. The company recently brought on a new technical director, someone who is pretty well know both in the sous vide world as well as Modernist Cuisine: Scott Heimendinger. Scott had worked at Modernist Cuisine previously as the director of applied science, but had in recent years had been focused on launching his own sous vide startup in Sansaire. He is back at Modernist, working on,according to his Linkedin, some stealth products.

I’ve asked Scott what he’s working on and he’s remaining tight lipped for now, which makes me wonder if Modernist is working on creating some new product(s) that could help change the way consumers cook. Time will only tell, and we’ll have to see if Modernist Cuisine CEO Nathan Myhrvold has anything to talk about at the Smart Kitchen Summit.

Looking forward, I expect to see lots of innovation in cooking, and there’s no doubt the foundations for much of the innovation we’ll see in the kitchen over the next decade

America’s Test Kitchen Wants To Bring Science To Cooking

Launched over two decades ago, America’s Test Kitchen has become the go-to resource for kitchen cooking instruction for home chefs. Now the group is looking to help take cooking to the next level and bring new cooks into the mix, with the launch of the Cook’s Science website. The group recently announced its launch, led by executive editors Molly Birnbaum and Dan Souza and aim to add an element of narrative in order to tell stories about the intersection of science and food.

Our Take: This initiative to look at science and technology and examine how they are changing how we cook is part of a growing trend. With the emergence of Guiding Cooking Systems, meal delivery services, app-based cooking gadgets and hands-off appliance functionality, we continue to see efforts to reinvent the core concepts in cooking and appeal to the next generation of cooks in the kitchen. There is a gap in concentrated reporting around this and other related subjects, including food technology, smart kitchen, the convergence of science and tech with food and more. We hope this and other similar efforts (like The Spoon!) will help tell interesting stories and spark a movement that drives the kitchen of the future.